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another random user sends this excerpt from the BBC:
"Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy. Google receives 20 million 'takedown' requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, every month. They are all published online. Recent submissions by Fox and Universal Studios include requests for the removal of previous takedown notices. ... By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts. 'It would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available,' wrote Torrent Freak editor Ernesto Van Der Sar on the site."

He meant that corporations can suppress the free speech rights of others, because they themselves are not bound by the first amendment, and also because they can strong-arm the government into giving the corporations pseudo-governmental powers that also sidestep the first amendment.

I don't think you understand what the first amendment is. It prevents the govt from controlling speech of its citizens. your comment says that govt can silence corpoarations because the first amenment doesn't apply, and that this is a pity. Is this what you meant to say?

A bigger pity still is that we get down on our knees and deepthroat the ??AA when we reelect their politicians over and over. The solution is obvious, but we remain too starstruck by bling to actually try it.

Who said anything about president? And there is the real problem, the people are only looking at the president, but when it comes to the people in the house/senate, they just vote for the guy who has the right letter behind them. Remember kids, the president doesn't make the laws. Please actually pay attention to your house/senate candidates next election.

Goodluckwiddat. I think one of the problems is this message that getting out to vote is such a noble thing to do. It isn't. If you aren't educated about a decision you participate in, then why are you participating to begin with?

IMO end the "get out the vote" "rock the vote" "vote or die" campaigns.

Consider that most of the current crop of politicians got their jobs because of massive "get out the vote!!111zor!" efforts. Consider further that this new crop of voters don't exactly have a firm logical grasp on what the hell is going on (as opposed to "the issues", which the media happily uses and manipulates as distraction and drama-generators). Mind you, this goes for activists and media on *both* 'sides' of the ideological aisle.

A bigger pity still is that we get down on our knees and deepthroat the ??AA when we reelect their politicians over and over.

...or buy tickets to their movies, or buy the Blu-Ray, DVD, etc...

But yeah, you're mostly right. I do disagree about it being a case of starstruck behavior, though. I think it's because the vast majority of the population simply doesn't give a crap. They're either completely ignorant about it, know something about it but think it's "too geeky" and happily not care, or they know all about it but happily download movies anyway (thinking that the odds of getting caught are well below that of getting busted for illegal marijuana use in Northern California).

Either way, until you can get the population both cognizant and passionate about it, approximately nothing will happen. Problem is, most folks get their info from, oh, wait - the media. The same media who really, really, really don't want you to get in the way of the revenue streams from their respective entertainment divisions.

A bigger pity that Google will get down on their knees and deepthroat the MPAA like a good little whore.

Your perspective is skewed. Google isn't doing this because the *AA asks them to, they are doing it because it is the law.

If the *AA's get out of hand, Google could easily just buy the entire industry. Every single one of those companies. With cash. Several times over. You don't seem to understand the amount of money Google has. They aren't kowtowing to private corporate interests at this point, they are simply doing what the law requires them to do. If you get a take-down notice, you have to take it down. If the *AA's begin to make the world suck too bad for Google, they could just purchase them and eradicate all of it.

Either way Google doesn't have the nearly $400 billion needed to buy the MPAA companies anyway. It's also highly doubtful the shareholders of every company would even agree to the buyout in the first place even if they did.

Wouldn't have to purchase all of them - just a couple of the big boys. Then have said big boys withdrawal from the MPAA cartel.

Problem is, once Google gets one of those, it's going to have to show some sort of profit, else the shareholders will rebel. This in turn leads to behavior designed to maximize profit, which is, well, what the MPAA members are doing.

Now if you can find a way to maximize profit with one of the companies, but without being a dick about it... but that's holy grail stuff.

The "big boys" are worth $108, $104 and $71 billion. Google doesn't have the cash nor is their stock worth enough to buy them all in a stock swap. This is before the fact that Google isn't just able to purchase these companies because they say so.

If the *AA's begin to make the world suck too bad for Google, they could just purchase them and eradicate all of it.

You make it sound as if buying another company is as easy as buying a gallon of milk. Buying another company requires interest on both sides, as well as a lot of paperwork an politics to get it approved.
Also, Google is not in the business of making content. They don't actually produce any content on any of their sites. They simply index what other people have created, and make it available.

According to Yahoo finance, Google has 48 billion in cash.

Google could easily just buy the entire industry. Every single one of those companies. With cash. Several times over.

except that most of the **AA companies are publicly traded. This means that all Google has to do is buy a majority of the stock and then kick out the damn idiots who are on the board for people they like. Then they get to set corporate policies such as Don't bother Google with redundent DMCA's as they're a waste of corporate money.

If the *AA's get out of hand, Google could easily just buy the entire industry. Every single one of those companies. With cash. Several times over.

Bullshit. Disney's market cap is ~$104 billion. Comcast has a market cap of ~$108 billion. Viacom has market cap of ~$31 billion. News Corp has a market cap of ~$71 billion. Time Warner has a market cap of ~$54 billion. Finally Sony has a market cap of ~$17 billion. So to purchase all the MPAA member companies they would need ~$385 billion. They don't have that in cash. Let alone "several times over".

Is that if Google was *able* to buy all these companies (and they can't, they don't have that kind of money, whatever you may think), then they WOULD NOT have to comply with "the law", because they would then own "the law" and could change the laws to whatever benefits them.

You've forgotten that the "laws" in this great nation are written by lobbyists, who work for the 1%. And if Google owns all those firms, they are the biggest 1%'er there is, alpha-dog, owner of all legislation. The government might as we

You're the one who is wrong. Your figures are right, but you don't know what they mean. Market cap (which the other poster had right) is the total value of all the stock (number of shares times share price). That is how much you would have to pay to 'buy the company'. Stockholder equity is assets minus liabilities and has nothing to do with how much it would cost to buy the company.

And while you're busily correcting his mistakes, you're missing the same thing everyone else in this minithread has missed.

Stock comes in multiple classes. Especially for a very large corporation like Disney or Comcast, there are whole swaths of that market cap which are utterly irrelevant. Why? Because there's absolutely no need to buy the company. It's only necessary to gain control of it. It's possible to gain control of a company by buying just enough of the voting stock.

A bigger pity that Google will get down on their knees and deepthroat the MPAA like a good little whore.

Your perspective is skewed. Google isn't doing this because the *AA asks them to, they are doing it because it is the law.

If the *AA's get out of hand, Google could easily just buy the entire industry. Every single one of those companies. With cash. Several times over. You don't seem to understand the amount of money Google has. They aren't kowtowing to private corporate interests at this point, they are simply doing what the law requires them to do. If you get a take-down notice, you have to take it down. If the *AA's begin to make the world suck too bad for Google, they could just purchase them and eradicate all of it.

If google could, they should. Buy them all up, and put everything 14+ years old in public domain. That would be a nice "do no evil" move.

I'm sorry but even the government is getting their hand slapped over secret proceedings (see the recent rulings regarding national security letters), there's no way we're going to allow companies to hide their actions in a civil matter.

We have complete control over our government. Giving away copies of movies, music, and other media is a crime as it atands in the US. It's a crime more or less everywhere where IP is respected. I'm agreeing it shouldn't be a crime but the system is doing what it has to do. As it stands the industry picks their fights carefully so as not to create groundswell in society against them. It's nothing new for them.

who is "they"? people seem to say this a lot, but don't seem to actually know who 'they" are. the government? the wealthy? or just people who get involved rather then sitting around blaming some mysterious group of people who are in control? if there is something about this world you don't like then take some advice, quit spending your time bitching about it and get off your ass and get involved.

" You're no longer part of the system. You are above the System. Over it. Beyond it. We're them. We're they. We are the Men in Black."

That doesn't make it ironic. It makes it obtuse perhaps. Irony is going further into the deep southern US in the antebellum period to escape slavery. I measure irony based on the Huckfinn test. The actual takedown of takedowns seems ironic but it is really based on different reasons so it isn't.

When you send a demand letter it is property of the recipient. They are free to publish it if they wish. A person receiving a DCMA take doewn notice is under no obligation, and in fact would be stupid to, agree to any confidentiality at all. The recipient is under no obligation to do so.

A more pressing area of legal disclosure is charges against otherwise innocent until proven guilty persons. Prosecutors do perp walks, and public news conferences, all the time despite the legal, and ethical, and moral, land mines.

When you send a demand letter it is property of the recipient. They are free to publish it if they wish. A person receiving a DCMA take doewn notice is under no obligation, and in fact would be stupid to, agree to any confidentiality at all. The recipient is under no obligation to do so.

A more pressing area of legal disclosure is charges against otherwise innocent until proven guilty persons. Prosecutors do perp walks, and public news conferences, all the time despite the legal, and ethical, and moral, land mines.

JJ

And the public laps it up. They don't ask why is an innocent man being bared in front of the camera like he's broken the law.

Of pirated material that has been mostly taken down. Right. Because that makes a shitton of sense, and it isn't already easy enough to pirate stuff if you want to anyway. They just don't want to look bad.

Sadly, I can attest that this is true. For some state licensing requirments the complaince forms were only allowed to be uploaded in CVS... I was hired to convert Excel spreadsheet data into a format compatible with the state's CVS format.

If it wasn't for these "executive" morons, "talented programmers" like me wouldn't have paid days off, like this one.

Some day I'm going to write a page about a "boardwalk game where you manage an empire from your throne" just to see how fast it gets blocked from google search results. Oops, I probably blocked Slashdot just by typing that. The robots who send the notices are amazingly stupid and use leaps of logic that make your average creationist look like an evidence-user.

I'm not saying piracy isn't happening out there, but from what I've seen I bet over 90% of DMCA notices are bogus. If anyone is crawling chilling-effects looking for juicy links to yummy forbidden files, boy are they going to be disappointed. They'll learn that someone's CS101 web crawling assignment has been emailing google about every damn page it finds.

Anyway, since in this case, the content's provenance is systematically known, they can confidently ignore the DMCA notices, as though they virtually received a counter-notice from within their own organization. No need to take anything down. Non-story, other than highlighting how amazingly bad the robots are, and that the special legal obligation created by them, probably ought to be removed or else notice-senders should be held accountable. Congress, do something about that. Can't someone just anonymously slip it into the budget bill?

BTW, I looked at the notices, they include a large number of links that start with vk.com [slashdot.org], which is a Russian version of FB, the way FB should have been designed.

It has a much better, more intuitive user interface from stories I read on comparing FB vs VK (vk means "v kontakte", which may be translated as "in touch" for "staying in touch") and on that site anybody can host any image, song, video and text they like and it's very easy to search through them and find whatever you want.

By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts. 'It would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available,' wrote Torrent Freak editor Ernesto Van Der Sar on the site."

I stumbled on one of these notices filed by the RIAA yesterday, and it seems not only reasonable but important for the notice to be posted, including the relevant URL; otherwise, how will I know that the site hosting the illegal material is doing so illegally? I looked at the site in question, and they most certainly didn't include any notice that downloading that particular song was a violation of copyright. But because of the notice that Google linked to, I knew that I shouldn't do it.

It seems to me that MPAA and RIAA want to have their cake and eat it, too.

The Movie industry does not want it known how active they are at sending take down notices. After all the price we all pay for movies goes up as there effort to do this sort of activity goes up. The 'take down tax'.

There is also the big brother bad guy protecting their profit against the little guy public relations problem. They certainly would like all that take down to happen behind the scenes where no one notices.

They (or rather, the dodgy "enforcement" companies they contract the work out to) don't want us to know how bad they are at sending out these notices. Takedown notices (particularly Google's) are now a running joke in some places, due to the percentage of mistakes (targeting reviews of films, IMDB/Wikipedia pages, pages that are unrelated but happen to have a few keywords, sites not indexed by Google, pages that no longer exist, etc.) and yet someone is paying a lot of money to issue all these notices.

People still need to know if THEIR URL is subject to a search engine entry takedown. The only case where the search engine would not need to provide it is if the party doing the takedown ALSO sends the info to the owner of the URL.

If the studios do drag Google employees to trial for that, they'd probably argue they were Just Following Orders, due to the company mission [google.com]. Not that the argument would save them, but takedown letters do have information and all...

Yes, unintentionally. In fact, the studios requesting the take down of the take down are the ones who gave up that location. They'd love to be able to say "A file at an undisclosed location is in violation of our copyright, but since we don't want to tell you where, please just block all searches for 'X, Y, and Z.'" But, since they have to actually say where they think it's coming from, they have to give up the position themselves.

I'm just curious if they'll send takedown notices on the takedown notices on the... well, you know. After all, Google may have to append the original notice on the 2nd one so everyone knows what's being referred to...

In this case I think the takedown notices are not for the removal of the pirate websites, but the removal of their URLs from Google's results. If the URLs remain in Google's takedown notice database, and the sites themselves are still up, people can just comb Google's database for pirate links.

That isn't to say that the larger 'problem' of piracy itself is anything but fiction, of course.

"In this case I think the takedown notices are not for the removal of the pirate websites, but the removal of their URLs from Google's results. If the URLs remain in Google's takedown notice database, and the sites themselves are still up, people can just comb Google's database for pirate links."

I see. I misread OP. I was thinking this was about YouTube (owned by Google), not about Google searches.